


the city's aflood (and our love turns to rust)

by irnan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen, james potter's parents are lovely but clueless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-14
Updated: 2011-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-27 08:43:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/293866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later on, Lily hopes rather fervently that Harry never finds out his parents' relationship basically began because of a battle. Or maybe she does. Perhaps he might understand a little better, be able to accept, not blame them for leaving him. Later still, Sirius forgets to tell him, but that's mostly because it's so sodding obvious the boy doesn't need to hear it to understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from U2.

It happens like this:

There's a crash of shattering glass and a scream. For an instant Lily doesn't even register what's happened - someone screamed, could have been anyone, doing anything, kids with water balloons, a dropped glass at Fortescue's. Then darkness creeping at the edges of her vision, another scream, she'd crossed the street quite ostentatiously to avoid Black and Potter but they're not looking at her they've got their wands out and –

"Mudblood whore!" shrieks a voice, triumphant, cold clammy fingers curling around her throat: Lily draws her wand and flings the other woman away with a jinx she doesn't remember casting, spins on her heel, blocks a Stunner, flings one back, the rubble in the street is Transfiguring into knives and darting at the Death Eaters, Prongs is at her elbow guiding the blades with wand up and left hand moving with it, sweep back and throw as if he's holding a Quaffle. More people are screaming. Distantly she thinks she sees Sirius scuffling with a Death Eater, hand to hand - idiot, is he a wizard or not? - she summons the roof tiles over Madam Malkin's and sends them cascading onto Bella's filthy mad head, but she flicks her wand and sends at least half of them rushing at Lily and Potter, who blasts half a dozen as Lily throws a Shield Charm over them both - scarcely enough, the wind's knocked out of her and she sees one wreck his knee, throw him sideways, watches him hit the ground. He twists, snakelike, quicksilver, fires off a jinx, wrenches an attacker into the air by his heels and Lily follows with a curse that knocks the man, still hanging upside-down in the air, into the walls of Gringotts a hundred yards away.

Bella again, shedding roof tiles and cackling. Sirius throws himself at her but he's sixteen and she's twenty, how many tricks has Voldemort taught her since Dumbledore expelled her from Hogwarts when they were twelve?

Glass shards sharp as James' knives earlier. Lily blocks them, feels them cut into her arms, watches them slide around her and slice into James –

"Let's see you play Quidditch now, blood traitor!"

James roars with the pain of it, all over blood, knee ruined irreparably, flings out his wand hand again and Transfigures the lopsided fountain into a miniature dragon that breathes fire and brimstone into Sev's leering, sneering face - Sev, whom Lily hesitates to attack, even still, even now, until he raises his wand: " _Cruci_ -"

" _Petrificus Totalus_!" she shouts and watches his body crash into the cobblestones, stiff as a board, may he be trampled underfoot and fall through the street into the deepest darkest cavern of Gringotts.

"Got to stop them - block the street -" James is gasping, clutching at his leg, screams from behind them sobs and cries, people running. Why are three Hogwarts students still a year away from NEWTs the only people in the vicinity prepared to stand up to these bastards?

They won't last much longer. Prongs is right. They need time, they need to regroup, they need reinforcements.

"Fire!" she says and her fingers slide, slick and bloody, on her wand. "The rubble - wood -"

He understands. They do it together: pile the rubble, Transfigure, light the flames: ordinary, magical, it doesn't matter. Sirius has lost Bella, he looks wrecked, covered in bruises as he crawls to them, hands shaking. "There's," he says. "Children. In the sidestreet - she just -"

But there's no time, no time at all. Lily forces the fire on, hotter and hotter, raises smoke that chokes and stings, sends it piling over their makeshift barricade into the Death Eater's faces, may they all choke on it and die of asphixiation, but they're still standing, still coming –

Her smoke pauses, the flames shiver. All Diagon Alley hovers on the edge of a precipice. Then Auror Moody flings the whole construct into the faces of the Death Eaters gathering behind it, and more besides: shattered glass, pebbles, cobblestones and roof tiles, tables and chairs, the cart of books from outside _Flourish and Blotts_. It's too much, and the Death Eaters aren't coordinated enough to counter it together, aren't strong enough to block it one by one. It sweeps the street clean.

When the dust settles, they're gone. Lily realises she's lying over James' prone, bleeding body and that Sirius in turn is shielding both of them.

Moody stumps over to them, magical eye spinning.

"Evans, Potter and Black," he says, speculatively. "Not bad. Not bad at all." And then, casually, he adds, "Better get to St Mungo's."

Easy for him to say.

*********

"No, no one," says Lily. "It'll be all right. I can get home." She has money, she can call a taxi. It'll be all her pocket money for a year gone, but better than the bus, the train, everyone staring.

The Healer looks at her: doubtful, suspicious. _If parents can't pick her up she must be a Mudblood –_

"That's quite all right, Adalbert. The young lady will be coming home with me."

Lily turns to this new voice, this competent firmness like her Dad's, like - well, like Professor McGonagall, when you get right down to it. It doesn't belong to a very tall woman; she's thin and grey-haired and has eyes like James'.

Adalbert has melted away, and Mrs Potter takes Lily's hands in her own; they are wrinkled and smooth like old leather, grip still tight and strong.

"Dear girl," she says. "Dear child. You saved him. Thank you."

"I think," says Lily, awkward, "he saved me." In those first few minutes, when she was still stunned and useless and gaping.

"A mutually beneficial arrangement," says Mrs Potter. "You will come home with us, won't you dear? Sirius has told me your parents might not know how to help you if - there are complications. I'm a Healer - let me look after you three."

She has a much nicer smile than her son's, even though it's exactly the same.

"I -" says Lily.

"Excellent," says Mrs Potter, plainly just as inclined to take no for an answer as her son. "We'll take the Floo, I think."

*********

James Potter lives in a mansion. Lily might have known, but she's too tired to be anything other than sleepy. Moderately clean and with her wounds dressed, she falls into the most comfortable spare bed she's ever touched and closes her eyes in relief.

*********

They eat breakfast in the kitchen; Sirius apparently has a _spot_ , and he glares at her when she sits in it. James's father is as lanky as he is, greeting her with careful, slightly old-fashioned charm. His hair is black, but it's not messy.

"Where's Prongs?" she asks when they've all sat down.

"Abed and asleep," says Mrs Potter. "And he won't be leaving it for another fortnight, not with that leg, and then on crutches. That is, if you're referring to James."

Lily flushes. The nickname had slid out before she'd realised it. Sirius taps his spoon against his cereal bowl and watches her with heavy-lidded eyes.

"I cannot imagine how you four came up with those ridiculous nicknames anyway," Mrs Potter adds, casting a glance at Sirius, who shrugs and grins.

"Will you chuck me out if I tell you we were drunk?"

Is he _living_ here?

"Certainly not, I'm well aware of what you two are capable of. The number of owls I get about that boy!"

"Mrs Potter," says Lily, anxious to find some other topic to think about than the ludicrous idea that James Potter's mother thinks he's an adorably mischievous but essentially harmless little bundle of fun, "I'm really very grateful to you for taking me in like this -"

"Nonsense dear, Alastor told us -"

"- but would you mind very much," Lily continues, gentle but firm, "if I used your telephone? I should tell my parents where I am."

She realises they're all staring at her.

"My dear, I'm afraid I don't know what that is," says Mrs Potter gently.

Lily draws a breath and lets it out into her cornflakes. "Oh," she says. "Of course. I -"

"Evans, have you never been in a wizarding house before?" Sirius asks bluntly.

"Most of them are all right with the theory of Mudbloods but not with the practice," says Lily sharply. "And that includes Marli McKinnon's parents, before you open your stupid fat mouth."

Her hands are shaking and she wants to cry. She doesn't even know where she is, for God's sake. This is practically _kidnapping_.

"So if - it it's not too much trouble - is there a village, I could get a taxi, or the bus -"

"The bus! Nonsense again. Under no circumstances will I allow a guest under my roof to leave here in order to travel miles on a bus, Muggle or otherwise. Sit down, child. You're exhausted, and you've had a nasty shock. Eat your cornflakes, have some bacon, then go back to bed. Ned will fetch your parents, won't you Ned?"

"Of course," says Mr Potter. "Do sit down, Miss Evans. Your cornflakes will go soggy." He smiles at her.

It's exactly the sort of maddeningly, stupidly practical thing Prongs would have said. Lily drops into her seat again and picks up her spoon. She glances up, catches Sirius' eye by accident.

He picks up the milk jug. "For that tea?"

And finally, all of a sudden, like a wall coming down that she'd been holding up so long she'd forgotten it was there, Lily Evans gives up and gives in and lets the Marauders do what they've been nagging her to let them do - consciously at first, and then unconsciously for five years after her 'final no, go away I will not be part of your silly gang' - since before Gideon Prewett had given them the stupid nickname.

She lets them win.

It's so easy, oh so easy, they've been different this year, harder, quieter, grimmer-yet-gladder, they've fought together side by side, she could have stood there and let Sev kill James and they all know it, they've banded together, despite themselves, against their better judgement, this tight fierce knot of students who'll stand up to Mulciber, to Avery, to Sev and his filthy _Sectumsempra_ that's left scars on half a dozen students that she knows of that McGonagall cannot prove (as if every cut and scar is him getting back at her for daring not to want a friend who calls her _Mudblood_ ), who'll hex the Slytherin Head Boy and get sent down for it, who'll dig their heels in at every turn and say: _no. No. No_.

Lily's been telling herself it was just for school, just for now, just for temporary protection and safety in (relative) numbers, but here's the thing: it really isn't.

Maybe she can live with fifteen-year-old Lily's howl of disgust if she tells the silly child it was a draw all along.

Maybe it _was_ a draw all along.

"Sure, Padfoot, ruin my tea," she says. And she kicks his shins under the table, in an Evans-and-Padfoot sort of way, and goes back to her cornflakes.

(Admittedly she doesn't actually snog James until Halloween, when he asks her to meet him in the Forbidden Forest and comes to her as a stag - as Prongs - as _himself_ , for the first time, whole and entire. But it's far too late by then anyway.)


	2. oh freedom is mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "So I'll drop by Saturday sometime and pick you up," shouted James across the station. Lily blew him a kiss, laughing.

"But you don't have to do this! Surely you don't have to do this - you could move, we could all move, Australia, Canada, anywhere!"

Mrs Evans' wail cut through James like a knife, even ten feet away and with the lounge door shut between them. He put his hands in his pockets, chewed on the inside of his cheeks. Behind him, Sirius was standing in the open front door, wand still out. When they'd found it unlocked, they'd pushed inside without thinking, and now that was turning out to be a less-than-brilliant decision.

Well, they were known for those.

From the lounge, Lily's tired voice said, "Mum..." James could picture the look on her face, the way she was holding herself, tired, stubborn. Neither of his own parents had questioned his and Sirius's decision to fight. They had fought against Grindelwald; Aunt Delia had died fighting Grindelwald. Nor had the Dark Mark raised above the ruins of Aunt Dorea and Uncle Charlie's house three years ago stopped them aiding Dumbledore in any way they could. But Lily's parents were Muggles; they had no idea of what was at stake.

"Lily, no. Don't _Mum_ me, I won't take it. You're asking me for permission to go out and die!"

This time, Lily's tone was sharper. "Forgive me if I didn't make myself clear. I am a fully accredited witch with six NEWTS to my name and an adult besides. I am _not_ asking your _permission_."

"Maybe we should go," James said quietly. "They're obviously all right."

Sirius gave him a look.

James shrugged.

They stayed.

"You're not eighteen yet," said Mrs Evans defiantly.

"I'm seventeen. That's of age. In my world."

"Young lady, while you live under this roof -"

"Mum, so help me, I can pack my bags in five minutes flat and be at Marli McKinnon's within three. Don't threaten me, you won't like the consequences."

"Lily, this - what's _happened_ to you?"

"I grew up," Lily said. "I was made Head Girl of a school tearing itself apart with fear. I watched people die when the Death Eaters attacked Diagon Alley, and just the other week I almost killed a boy who used to be my best friend because he attacked a _thirteen year old child_ for no better reason than who that child's mother was."

"You're a child yourself," said Mrs Evans shrilly. "Harry, say something to her!"

There was a pause. Sirius shifted to press a shoulder against James', who knew he'd gone pale. That attack on Diagon Alley had left him with a limp, an impressive collection of scars on that leg, and more nightmares than Remus' worst transformations ever had. Sirius' memories of it were no better. What was saving the life of one child against the deaths of five others that you hadn't been able to prevent?

Finally, Henry Evans sighed. "No," he said.

" _No_?!"

"Daisy, listen. She's an adult -"

"She isn't!"

"Daisy, we let her go. We let her go to Hogwarts. You can't undo that. You can't turn back time and make her not a part of that world."

"Dad," Lily said quietly.

"Lily," he said; it sounded as if he'd stood up, crossed the room to join her. "I want you to be safe."

"I know you do."

"I doubt it," said her father. "I doubt you'll have the slightest inkling of what I'm talking about until you're a mother yourself. But I can't - Daisy, listen to me. I can't in good conscience stop her from going."

"You're mad," said his wife angrily. "This - this is about your sainted father, isn't it, Colonel bloody Evans..."

"He was a good man -"

"He _died_ , Harry, he died in the trenches, and you can talk about his duty and yours until you're blue in the face but how are you giong to feel when it's your _daughter_ you're wearing those bloody poppies for?"

Her voice had risen to a shriek, and left a ringing silence when it died away. There was the sound of a harsh, gasped breath, and then quiet sobbing.

"Let her go," said a fourth voice suddenly.

"Petunia," gasped her mother.

"Let her go, Mum. One less suicidal freak in the family -"

"And when the Death Eaters come for you, Tuney, and cut your husband's heart out in your perfect sparkling kitchen and nail it to the wall before they have you  die screaming under the Cruciatus curse the way Mary McDonald's mother did -"

"Enough!" shouted Mr Evans. "Enough from the lot of you. Petunia, be as bitter as you like, but don't you ever dare speak that way about your sister again. Lily, every syllable of that speech was unworthy of you. Daisy, stop _crying_. Lily's chosen her life, and chosen well, whatever happens."

"I'm done here," said Lily, and James knew she was white with anger. "I'm leaving, I'm leaving now. Mum... do what you like. Dad, I'll be gone a couple of days."

"You're not to go to that McKinnon girl's!" cried her mother. "It was her started this, don't I know it, every time she was round here -"

"FINE!" Lily bellowed at the top of her lungs. "Then I'll bunk with the Marauders, and Mum can have her hysterics over my ruined virtue as well as everything else!"

James and Sirius bolted out the front door before she could leave the lounge and slumped in the relative safety of the porch, waiting for her.

"Ruined virtue?" said Sirius.

"I don't know about ruined," said James. "Superfluous, possibly..."

Before Sirius could answer, the door was wrenched open.

"Speak of the devil," said Lily. She really was white with anger, and her hands were shaking. "I suppose you heard that?"

"Some," said Sirius. "Didn't I always tell you you could scream louder than any banshee that's ever existed?"

Lily barked a laugh. It was a far cry from the cheerful whoop James was used to from her.

"I need to get out of here," she said. "I need -"

"A drink," said James, careful not to touch her. She could never stand being touched when she was angry. "I know just the place. Come on." He stepped off the porch and tucked his hands back into his pockets to keep from flicking them through his hair in that way Lily had once told him she hated. Sirius cocked his head at Lily; James was reminded, sharply, of the way Padfoot would pause and prick his ears in the forest.

"Deep breaths, Evans," said Sirius. "The idea is to pass out after imbibing the alco... hol."

Mr Evans had followed his daughter onto the porch.

"Hmph," he said, eying the boys up and down, from scuffed boots to glasses to Sirius' leather jacket. Instinctively, James tilted his chin up, narrowed his eyes - it was what his Mum did just before she took some idiot at St Mungo's down by so many pegs they ended up underground. (Although it had to be said that on her it looked regal; on James it just looked arrogant.) "The Marauders, I take it?"

"Two of," said Sirius.

"Black and Potter," said Lily, gesturing. "Don't give yourself brain fever trying to work out which one's the bigger idiot."

"The one _not_ going out with you, presumably," said her father.

"I call that sensible," said Sirius airily.

Well, James' options were looking cheerful. Pretend to be exasperated...

"He's probably not wrong."

... put his foot in it.

But Lily was grinning - properly grinning - so _that_ was all right.

Her father frowned. "Lily, I think you should -"

"I'm not staying. Not after that. Petunia," she added, casually vicious, "can go choke on her fruit cake at the WI."

Mr Evans sighed. "She loves you," he tried.

"She loves herself more."

Her father shifted, but James noted that he didn't actually deny it. His shoulders hunched slightly, and he turned his body, seeming to want to block Sirius and James out of the conversation. James stood his ground, though Sirius shot a questioning look at him.

"And are these -"

"The people to whom I intend to entrust my life?" Lily said coolly.

He set his jaw, stubborn.

"You don't get to tell Mum to back off and then try the same thing using different words."

Henry Evans rubbed his hands through his hair. "I’m not, I promise you,” he said. “Lily, I just -"

" _Dad_. I really am going. _Now_."

She slid past him, caught Sirius' hand, dragged him off the porch, slid her other hand into James'. "Moony coming?"

"Meeting him there," said James. "Listen, Evans."

He could feel Lily's fingers tighten spasmodically around his; saw something like fear in the look she gave him. _Don't do this to me. Don't take their side. Don't trap me here. Don't prove me wrong._

Her father was watching: _Make her see sense. Prove you're right for my daughter_.

"Since you stayed over I can't find my Quidditch shirt."

And watched that smile of hers light up her face, and her eyes wrinkle at the corners, and felt her thumb rub over the back of his hand, a promise new-discovered, whose very possibility they had never before been truly aware of.

"I've been kipping in it," she said merrily.

" _Lily_ ," her father burst out. Strange that he could let her go off to fight a war but looked angry at the idea that she and James had...  spent the night together.

She turned back to face him, calm as calm could be. "Dad, I love you. And Mum. I'll be round... I'll be round some time next week, all right?"

"Come along, children," said Sirius. " _It's getting to the point where I'm no fun anymore_..." 

"Worst taste in music ever," said James. Lily dragged them off across the scraggly front lawn and refused to look back as they wandered down the street.

James did. Mr Evans raised a hand to him when he saw, standing forlornly on the front porch. James nodded back at him, feeling oddly guilty (he was the pureblood, it was his _responsibility_ to stop this, his and Sirius’s, like a family problem you wanted to deal with without involving outside authorities), but Lily’s hand was warm and firm in his, and she smelt like roses, and she loved him. He loved her. And Sirius, and Remus and Peter and Marli and Dorcas and Alice and Gideon and Fab and Mary...

 _Together_ , he thought. _Together, or not at all_.


	3. then burning down love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Potter, I don't think you've met my sister Petunia."

Marauder holidays never turn out well. James has learned this through trial and error and divers alarums, not to mention that time they got lost in the fog up near Newcastle and ended up camping in the graveyard by accident.

Creepy.

But this is different. For one thing, it's not really a holiday. For another, Evans is asleep on his chest. For a third, her parents are occupying the room _right next door_.

Which is sort of a buggering nuisance, all things considered.

He couldn't not come. Not after she turns up on his doorstep in a bridesmaid's dress, white and shaking: _you have to stop me I'm going to kill her I really am_. He'd laughed at her once when she told him that Petunia ruined everything she touched, but never again. It even extends to the girl's own wedding.

He's still not entirely clear on what happened, exactly. He's not sure anybody is, apart from the Evans sisters themselves. There was a fight - obviously - and Petunia threw something at Lily - there's a bruise on her shoulder - and knowing Evans, knowing her reactions and her reflexes the way he does (fought with her, fought beside her, learned from and taught her), she probably came within a hair's breadth of hexing Petunia straight into St Mungo's and out the other side into the graveyard, and that, he suspects, is when she Apparated to his place.

The other thing James Potter isn't entirely clear on is how they got from _let's never leave this room again_ to, well, this room that they're actually in, instead of the other one they weren't going to leave. That's weddings for you, they make people do ridiculous things.

 (The idea that one day he and Lily -)

She shifts and sighs into his shoulder.

"Awake?"

"Hmm," she groans. "Whyyyyy?"

How's your shoulder, are you hungry, can I get you anything?

Problem with being - with going out with Evans is that he's never really thought about it in great detail before - not beyond _she's gorgeous and I love her_ \- and now he has her mad sister to deal with and her Dad who's none too impressed with the way he teases her in public and how she never wears pyjamas because she prefers to kip in his shirts and the fact that she eats porridge for breakfast, which is so abhominably boring there aren't words for it as well as all these instincts telling him to treat her like a china doll when he knows perfectly well she hates that - and even if it didn't, it would never have occurred to him to do it before they - _before_ , what the sodding hell is wrong with him? She's not Mum, to be cosseted and have doors held open for her and ice packs put on her aching head when she comes home in the evenings.

James is busy adjusting his whole concept of long-term relationships right now. For _her_. (Pathetic. On the other hand, he always hated being sent to get Mum those ice packs.)

"You drank too much," he says instead.

"You opened the Firewhiskey."

"You looked like you needed it. Just not quite that much."

She laughs. "Thanks for this."

"For what?"

"Comin' back here with me."

"Evans," he says extravagantly, "I'd follow you to the ends of the Earth. Only, you know, in a romantic way, not a weird one."

Lily laughs again, full-throated and smoky. "Three years ago you would not have added that disclaimer."

"It was my understanding that's why you're going out with me now and not three years ago."

She pats his chest. "Your understanding is not as deficient as I once believed."

"Dear Merlin, a compliment. Be still, my beating heart - one nice word from you and I see stars, Lily, I really do. Fireworks explode across my vision."

She hides her face in his shoulder; hers are shaking with giggles. Wand-callused thumb and forefinger brush his ribs, slide under his shirt, and he shivers at her cold deft fingers on his skin. "Thank you," she says again. "Oh, James. Thank you."

He rolls over, drops her into the curve of his body, slings his leg across her thighs. "Imagine if you _had_ gone out with the giant squid. _He_ wouldn't be here right now."

Another burst of giggles, dancing warm across his neck, his collarbone. "Tomorrow," she says, "will you help me with something?"

"Course I will."

Grin. He can feel it - taste it in the darkness, under his fingers. "I want to turn every single bridesmaid's dress in this place, and all Petunia's things, and every tablecloth and towel and the sodding pink bunting in the reception room _black_."

James pauses. "Nah," he says. "Green. Match your eyes. I'll do the bunting and the tablecloths if you do the dresses."

"Match my eyes?"

"You've got fantastic eyes, Evans."

"Hmm," she says again. "Listen, when we get married, I'm not inviting Tuney and I'm not having a six-tier wedding cake that looks like the spectator stands from the local cricket pitch gone wrong and covered in icing."

 (One day, he and Lily.)

"Don't tell me," he says. "Tell Sirius. He's best man."

"You what?"

"The best man arranges the wedding. My Dad arranged Uncle Charlie and Aunt Dorea's and it was pandemonium. I fell in the duck pond at one point. I was only about three, it was the best day ever."

"No! Not really? What about the bride?"

James is honestly puzzled. "You mean Muggle girls have to arrange their own weddings?"

"It's considered the thing, yes." Lily's propped up on an elbow now, grinning down at him.

"Bloody hell. Well I mean, what's the point of having a best man? That's what they're for, to take all that crap off your hands."

"I think Muggles assume the best man is there to stop the groom from running away."

"Oh," says James. "Oh, well. We definitely won't be needing Sirius for that."

Her hair is falling over her shoulders; he catches a red-auburn handful of it and lets it run thick and warm through his fingers. "When we buy the rings," she says, "would it be all right if we had silver?"

"Silver tarnishes," says James. (Silver's Slytherin.)

Lily flushes - just a bit. "Yes," she says. "But it makes me think of you - of you in the Forest, you know, at Halloween, and how your eyes looked, and - everything."

Everything: her mouth on his, and the way she shivered and clung to him against the wind, and how she let him carry her up a whole flight of stairs under the Cloak until they both collapsed at the top in stitches and fits of silly, joyful, delighted laughter.

"All right," he says. "Silver. Will you please finally let me buy you jewellery as well? A bracelet, or earrings, or a necklace to hang here."

He touches his fingertips to the dip between her collarbones, under her throat. She dips her head and kisses the back of his hand, hair falling into his face.

"I might."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The bit about mistakenly-camping-in-a-graveyard-in-the-fog actually happened to my grandfather and his friends once when they were boys. The way he told it, it was the best story ever. Also, I made up the whole best man thing out of whole cloth only to realise it doesn't match in the least with what we saw of Bill and Fleur's wedding. But I _liked_ it!


End file.
